The Rocket on a Bicycle

On the evening of 21 November 1963, on a strip of sandy coast in Kerala, a small rocket stood pointing at the sky.

Around it were coconut palms, the sea, and a fishing village called Thumba, just outside the city of Trivandrum, now Thiruvananthapuram. A few young Indian engineers and scientists waited at their posts, with some visiting American experts beside them. Most of them had never launched a rocket before.

At about twenty-five minutes past six, the rocket roared upwards on a trail of fire. High above the sea, it released a cloud of sodium vapour that glowed orange in the last of the evening light. People watching from the beaches and the city could see it.

India's first rocket had flown. The country's space programme had begun.

A dream in a hurry

The man behind it was Vikram Sarabhai, a physicist from Ahmedabad. He believed that space science was not a luxury for a poor country. He thought satellites could one day help India with weather forecasts, communications and education in faraway villages. With the support of the nuclear scientist Homi Bhabha, he persuaded the government to set up a national committee for space research in 1962.

Sarabhai argued that India must not wait until it was rich to take part in advanced science. If the country was to use these tools for its own people, its own scientists had to learn them, from the very beginning.

The first step was to launch small "sounding rockets". These do not go into orbit. They rise high into the upper atmosphere, take measurements, and fall back into the sea.

Why Thumba?

The place for the launch site was chosen with care. Thumba lies very close to the Earth's magnetic equator, the invisible line around the planet where the Earth's magnetic field runs level. The upper atmosphere above it behaves in special ways, and scientists from many countries wanted to study it.

But the land was not empty. Fishing families lived there, and on the site stood the church of St Mary Magdalene.

The story of what happened next is told with great affection in Kerala. Sarabhai met the Bishop of Trivandrum, Peter Bernard Pereira. The bishop listened, and then put the question to his congregation at Sunday service. The people agreed to move to a new place, where a new church and new homes would be built for them. They gave up their old church for science.

A church for an office

The old church became the space centre's first office and workshop. The priest's house beside it became the place where the scientists worked and met. There was no proper laboratory, no canteen and very few vehicles.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, who was one of the young engineers, later remembered how simple everything was. Parts and equipment were moved around the site on bicycles and, it is often said, heavier loads went by bullock cart. A famous photograph from those early years shows two men wheeling part of a rocket along on the back of a bicycle.

The first rocket itself, a two-stage Nike-Apache, was supplied by NASA in the United States, and its scientific payload came from France. But the Indian team had to put it all together, prepare the site and carry out the launch. They worked long hours, ate at the railway station or wherever they could, and learned as they went.

The glowing sodium cloud had a purpose. By photographing how it drifted and spread, scientists could measure the winds blowing high above the Earth, far above where any aircraft could fly.

From Thumba to the Moon

The launch on 21 November 1963 was a success. In the years that followed, hundreds of sounding rockets were fired from Thumba, by Indian scientists and by teams from many other countries. In 1968 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi dedicated the site to the United Nations, as a place for international science.

Soon the engineers began to design and build their own rockets. In 1969 the Indian Space Research Organisation, ISRO, was founded. In 1980 India launched a satellite into orbit on its own rocket. Then came satellites for weather and television, a mission to Mars in 2013, and in 2023 a gentle landing near the south pole of the Moon.

The old church at Thumba still stands. Today it is a space museum. Children visit it to see the early rockets, and to stand in the room where it all began.

Want to read more?

ISRO: A Personal History, by R. Aravamudan, one of the engineers at the first launch, tells the early days with warmth and humour. From Fishing Hamlet to Red Planet, published with ISRO, gathers memories from many of the scientists who built India's space programme.